Heather Mallick is a columnist for the Toronto Star.
On Friday night, Britain slipped out of the European Union under cover of darkness. Nobody knows how to characterize it: a woman escaping a controlling man; a drug-addled teen running away from censorious parents; a former colonial power escaping its own colonization; a caterpillar emerging as a beautiful butterfly to float above the fens and spinneys of greenest England.
Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson would say the last, but then he would, wouldn’t he? The hopeless, hapless Jeremy Corbyn, still leader of the flattened Labour Party, will miss running Little England as a co-op making bricks out of mud and straw, with everyone sharing in the washing-up.
The Guardian’s reliable economics editor, Larry Elliott, concludes mournfully that Britain didn’t do that well within the EU anyway and, maybe, free of European regulation, a Briton — Alan Turing reborn — might come up with an idea that spawns the new Google in artificial intelligence. That would be nice.
Maybe young people, without hoping of moving out and up in the world, trapped in village England, will finally start doing the harvesting and fruit-picking previously handed off to desperate migrants from Eastern Europe. It would charm aristocrats to see local people working in the fields again, and grateful for the chance.
At any rate, any advantage to England and Wales (Scotland’s leaving, count on it) will not show itself before a decade passes, and the Twenties will be rough.
The simultaneity is killing. At precisely the same moment, two once-great nations in decline are doing their absolute best to self-destruct and for what? Republican senators stuck on acquitting U.S. President Donald Trump don’t realize he’ll commit worse treason and more daylight robbery, if he hasn’t already. If impeachment doesn’t work this time, there will be no mechanism to rein him in. The U.S. will be lawless.
I watch U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts reading out written impeachment questions on slips of paper as if he were a dad wearing a paper hat and reading out Christmas cracker riddles.
“What’s green and sings? Anybody?”
“Elvis Parsley.’ Ha ha, good one.”
We see Britain elect Johnson, a clown with a good banter, but without the intellect and knowledge to revive a failing nation, as he proved when he tried to be mayor of London. Johnson has form. He isn’t a manager, he clearly hates going up north to talk to proles underwater from relentless flooding, he’s no good in a crisis, and seven crises are on the way.
Try coronavirus, climate change, a health service running on fumes, a six-year-long lineup at the coast and people living in tents at St. Pancras’s Eurostar gate, a huge grocery list, Trump with a punishing trade offer and a European neighbourhood sans goodwill.
Brexit was Little Britain’s dirty protest, if you recall 1970s IRA prisoners spreading their own filth over their cell walls. If you treat us like animals, we’ll behave like animals. It is spiritually self-annihilating.
Little Britain needs practical leadership. The absurd and languid Jacob Rees-Mogg and the bullied Michael Gove aren’t it.
Equally, the U.S. needs courage and pride but the Senate chamber has none to spare.
Both Little Britain and the U.S. will cling to past glories.
Sadly, they aren’t shared. The Brits had the 19th century, Americans the 20th, but there’s no special relationship. Americans have always been thoroughly transactional.
And now Germany will run Europe, which will upset the French no end, but there’s not much the French can do about it because the French army is silly, as in Dunkirk silly.
It’s 1940 all over again and there are no Churchills.
I sometimes think that no nation — or person — can escape the deep drag of their nature. The U.S. cannot escape the octopus-like hold of slavery. Many of those Republican senators gluing themselves to Trump were elected by angry whites seeing power slip away for a century. They’re not distinguished men; in a distant era, they were the shifty plantation overseers, thieves, contemptuous of the law. The Trump divide feels like a Civil War re-enactment.
And Britain, for reasons that elude foreigners, wants again to be the nation that stood alone in the Battle of Britain fighting off the Hun. Where lies the splendour of solitude now?
Both the U.S. and Britain are building walls.
Trump’s border wall? Winds blew it over on Thursday. Into Mexico. When it rains, trees and detritus pile up against the wall and cause flash floods, so the gates must be left open, which makes it not a wall.
Britain, slipping into the sea with London soon to be the new Venice, still regards the Channel as a wall — “a rocky shore beating back the envious siege” — without considering the possibility that it’s no longer worth invading. Who would have this shabby place full of moaners and clingers?
The quoted phrase was from Shakespeare, Britain’s only really fantastic export. What a century the 16th was. Let’s go there, Britain says, and start all over again.
